Even a Struggling Student Can Make a Comeback: Burning Books to Boost Intelligence

Lin Yucheng grew up in the countryside. He was a playful underachiever who hated studying, and his grades were always among the bottom two in his class. Yet the girl he liked was Hu Kexin, a campus belle and top student from a wealthy family. Lin Yucheng had nothing to offer except a lot of nerve, and he tried every way he could think of to pursue her. Naturally, he only annoyed her and got turned away. Who would like someone poor, lazy, and not exactly stupid? Then, one year during the Ghost Festival, he walked down a street and passed a fire where people were burning paper money. He heard voices asking for official posts, fame, wealth, marriage, and romance... He was baffled. What was going on? Suddenly, he understood: people had written their wishes on paper and were burning them as offerings to their ancestors. If that was really how it worked, then if he burned books, wouldn’t the knowledge go straight into his brain? He went home, wrote down the math and physics formulas he found hardest to memorize, and burned the paper. Sure enough, the formulas appeared in his mind, and he understood them thoroughly. He tried burning an old textbook from a previous term, and soon he had learned everything in it. He burned two more books, but by the time he tried to burn a third, he became dizzy and nauseous, on the verge of throwing up. The knowledge could still enter his mind, but he couldn’t understand or absorb it. He figured there was a limit to how much he could take in each time. Still, if he burned two or three books per session, sooner or later he could go from an underachiever to a genius, and naturally become a more worthy match for campus belle Hu Kexin. The thought made him happy. So he gathered secondhand textbooks, from kindergarten through university, from recycling centers and online. He burned one or two books every day. He would make up for everything he had failed to learn in the past, and even learn in advance what he hadn’t yet studied.